13 Very Useful Tutorials on Lightroom for Landscape Photographers

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For many landscape photographers, Adobe's Lightroom is an essential part of their workflow. Indeed, it remains the industry standard in post production software for a good reason . But getting to grips with the ins and outs of any piece of software can be difficult. That is why we have sorted some of these useful tutorials for landscape photographers – so you can get up to speed with this amazing piece of software and what it can help you do with your own Lightroom workflow and photographs.

For other ideas, don't forget to take a look at our article on landscape post production.

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Photo by Daniela Cuevas

Lightroom Workflow Tutorials

Setting up Lightroom is well worth doing right at the beginning of your adventures with the program. These couple of tutorials will show you how the experts do exactly that.

These Are the Keys to Keeping Your Lightroom Installation in Optimum Condition – Lightroom is an amazing app. Capable of cataloguing and editing tens of thousands of RAW images all from the click of a mouse. Despite its slick interface and beautifully presented images, Lightroom is, at heart, just a big database. The problem with databases is that as they get bigger, so they can slow down and even start throwing out some garbled data. Lightroom is exactly the same. There are however, a number of highly useful things that you can do to keep Lightroom running fast and efficiently.

How to Make a ‘Round Trip’ in Lightroom (LR to Photoshop, Back to LR) – Adobe’s Lightroom is an incredibly powerful tool incorporating perhaps 80-90% of all the tools that we photographers generally need. There are however times, when we need to do some post production work in Photoshop, perhaps working in layers, maybe for the content aware move tool, whatever the reason, we need to be able to move cleanly from Lightroom to Photoshop and back, so called “round tripping.” With both products being Adobe and well integrated, this is fairly easy to do although it might not be obvious to everyone, how to do it. Here we take a look at that procedure, allowing you to improve your Lightroom / Photoshop workflow.

7 Lightroom Workflow Tips For Simple, Stunning Landscape Photography – Lightroom is a great tool for landscape photographers, but there’s a few tricks to actually using the program to cut back on the time spent at the computer so you can spend more time behind the camera. Here are seven ways to improve your Lightroom workflow and still get that stunning end result.

The Complete Guide to Organizing Your Photos with Adobe Lightroom – The Lightroom Library module takes over the functions of that spreadsheet but it is much more flexible and powerful. With tools like ‘Smart Collections’ you can create groupings of images based on various parameters such as the date of creation, the camera used or keywords.

5 Quick Lightroom Tips To Improve Any Landscape – There are a lot of little things that landscape photographers do in Lightroom to get that small edge for their images. This list of tips is worth keeping in your pocket.

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Photo by Wolfgang Moritzer

Lightroom Presets Are Also Very Useful for Landscape Photographers

Presets allow you to quickly and easily achieve certain looks in your images. Black and white, old film (like Fuji Velvia, Kodachrome etc), Instagramish type looks, saturated or desaturated looks – it is all possible. Learn how to use them and you will save a lot of time in front of the computer and having a decent collection can also help you get a quick start in deciding the style of a landscape image. You can see our own selection of commercial Lightroom presets here or follow these quick tuts on incorporating you own presets into your workflow.

How to Create a Preset in Lightroom CC – We all have our own personal processing preferences that we do 99% of the time. From the moment we import files into Lightroom to the time we export a file for printing, we can create presets. A preset is the method of naming and saving processing steps for future, repetitive use when needed. Presets can be used in a myriad of post processing steps.

How to Install Presets in Lightroom – Two questions frequently asked relating to Lightroom presets include: “Where do I find them?” and “How do I install them?” As far as how to install the presets, this isn’t particularly difficult but it also isn’t as straightforward as some users might think. So here’s a little help for those who need it.

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Presets can be handy!

Tutorials for Improving Your Landscape Shots in Lightroom

The 10 Lightroom Tools That Are A Landscape Photographer’s Dream – As we know, Lightroom has become a very powerful tool not only for image management but also for post production. Amongst the tools available are some excellent ones for the landscape photographers amongst you. Here we take a look at ten of the best.

5 Simple Lightroom Tactics to Improve Almost Any Landscape Photograph – What specifically can you do for your landscape images in Lightroom? Let’s look at a few simple LR edits that will get most landscape photos popping a little more.

How to Use Lightroom’s Contrast, Clarity, Sharpening & Dehazing Tools for Better Images – There are four Lightroom 6 tools that add a bit of sharpness (not to be confused with the action of sharpening) to an image. These include Contrast, Clarity, Sharpening and Dehazing. Understanding how they work is important in optimizing adjustments. Overdoing these can make a photo look fake, overdone and over processed. Not applying enough could mean just another ‘nice’ photo.

5 Quick and Simple Lightroom Edits to make your Images Pop – It’s possible to spend hours on a single image using Lightroom’s extensive tools but the raison d’être of Lightroom is to speed up the photographer’s post production workflow. Today we are going to look at some very quick and easy edits that can dramatically improve the look of your photos.

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Photo by Aditya Siva

More Lightroom Goodies

5 Free Lightroom Resources all Photographers Should Know About – Lightroom isn’t just post processing software, though; this stand-alone app allows you to organize, refine, share, and print your images with relative ease. It’s accessible enough for casual users and powerful enough for pros.

Creating a High Key Landscape Using Lightroom – High key landscapes can be very effective and powerful. This quick Lightroom tutorial walks you through how to create one yourself.

3 Easy Lightroom Adjustments to Add Drama to a Landscape – Creating strong compositions and light is a key skill to landscape photography. This tutorial will help you get part of the way there with Adobe Lightroom.

Takeaways on Using Lightroom as a Landscape Photographer

  • Establish a good workflow – Getting into good habits early will really serve you well as a Lightroom User
  • Know the Key Controls for a Landscape Photographer – There are a few tools in Lightroom that all landscape photographers will keep going back to.
  • Get Some Presets – They will save you a lot of time and give you some great ideas. Check ours out here.
  • Go Shoot – Post processing is fun, but you still need the raw material. Get out and shoot with your camera!

About Author

Rob is the founder of Light Stalking. His love for photography started as a child with a Kodak Instamatic and pushed him into building this fantastic place all these years later, and you can get to know him better here.
Rob's Gear
Camera: Nikon D810
Lenses: Nikkor 14-24 f/2.8, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8

as usual, a number of great ideas and alternative ways of thinking…always helpful to those of us still trying to figure it out. thanks to every at light stalking

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